Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind (18 page)

51st Highland Division

And so the 51st Highland Division fell back towards Le Havre, expecting an evacuation. Some had been told what had happened at Dunkirk. Others were unaware of the scale of the defeat inflicted upon the Allies but, as most would later realize, ignorance was bliss. Had they known the punishment inflicted on their comrades in the north, they might have felt even less certain about their own ability to resist the surging enemy advance.

By the time of the retreat, the so-called Highland Division was far from the homogeneous organization that name suggested. The infantry battalions in the division may all have been from the Highlands, but many of its other units reflected the diversity of the modern army. The Sherwood Foresters, the East Kents and others had joined the division during the retreat. Other incomers included the 101st Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, who were attached to the Highlanders near Abbeville. They joined other non-Scottish formations like the pioneers of the Norfolk Regiment, the machine-gunners of the Middlesex Regiment and the 1st Royal Horse Artillery, whose prestigious gunners had been among the first units to arrive in France back in September 1939.

Within these regiments were a wide selection of men whose role alongside the Highlanders would be largely forgotten – first when the defeat of the 51st Division was widely ignored to concentrate on the ‘victory’ at Dunkirk, then secondly when those highlighting the sacrifice of the 51st focused upon the events of June 1940 as a tragedy for Scotland. While the greatest burden of the slaughter was borne by the Scottish infantry, thousands of those who fought in the retreat to St Valery owed no allegiance to the Highlands. Indeed many were from backgrounds as far removed as imaginable from the wild northern lands from which men like David Mowatt had come.

As the 1st Armoured Division moved into position at Abbeville they were accompanied by the 44th Battery of the 101st Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, formerly the Finsbury Rifles, a Territorial unit from the heart of London. With them was an ambitious young bombardier who had already been ‘at war’ for eighteen months. Fred Coster had joined the Territorial Army in early 1938, a patriotic reaction to the German annexation of Austria. In October that year, in the midst of the Munich crisis, he was called from his bed in Stepney, east London, and told his unit had been mobilized. For nearly a year they found themselves, armed just with First World War Lewis guns, defending the skies above Kent. They were still there on the morning of 3 September 1939 when the very first air-raid sirens sounded – marking the start of the Second World War.

Fred Coster was a typical Cockney – he was from a poor but respectable family and had an indefatigable spirit that saw him through the hard years of the 1930s and into the harsh realities of wartime life. His naturally cheery confidence – or cheek as some might have called it – was amply demonstrated while working as a junior lift operator in a City of London office. Hearing there was a job on offer in a firm of stockbrokers, he walked out of the lift, still clad in his work uniform, and presented himself in the office asking for a job: ‘I think the manager gave it to me because of my cheek. So I became a stockbroker’s clerk.’ However, by June 1940 the streets of London were behind him, as he prepared himself for his first battle outside Abbeville.

Not far away was another young gunner, also preparing for his first battle. Like Fred Coster, Gordon ‘Nobby’ Barber was from a poor London background, having been brought up in two rooms in Anerley with his parents and five siblings. Fired from his job as a laundry delivery boy, he could not accept the enforced poverty of his parents’ existence, so made a difficult but rational decision when his father questioned his plans for the future:He asked me ‘When are you going to get a job?’ I didn’t know. I was eighteen, I was fed up being an errand boy, I was getting older and I hadn’t got the brains to get a better job. I said I wanted to see the world. He told me to buck me ideas up. He started to give me a lot of mouth and I was getting fed up with it. I said, ‘It’s no good you talking – you’ve never had a job. You’ve been unemployed for a bloody hundred years!’ He lost his temper with me and said, ‘Do you a bit of good to get in the bloody army! That’ll make a man of you.’ That was when it clicked.

With the idea planted in his head, Barber went to visit a friend on leave from the army. The man warned him that the training was hard at first but once that was over there were great opportunities to travel: ‘I thought “Oh, sod it. I’ll join the army.” So I went up to Woolwich to join the artillery. They signed me in and I went home, told Mum and she burst into tears. It was the 3rd of January 1938. It was a month before my nineteenth birthday.’

Just as so many other young men would discover in the years that followed, Barber found life in the army was far removed from the glamour of recruitment posters:It was bloody hard in the army. It was a rough life. ’Cause we were Horse Artillery we had to march holding a whip. We were supposed to keep it straight but mine never was. There were three of us, all the same – right idiots. That was the type went in the army in them days. I wasn’t the best at pickin’ things up. I was worried about my passing-out parade. I thought I might get chucked out. How they punished you was by getting all of the squad to do everything again, so me and my two mates weren’t popular. But the other blokes taught us how to do it. We had to practise in the barrack room – all the time. You’d be going to the loo and someone would shout, ‘Take that bloody whip with you and when you’re having a piss make sure you’re holding it straight!’ I took a couple of good hidings from that lot – and I gave a few out an’ all. It was rough in those barracks!

Despite the initial difficulties, Barber began to settle into life in the army. He prided himself on his appearance and made sure his kit was laid out perfectly for inspections. The new recruits learned to polish their boots till they gleamed. Their brass buttons and buckles shone like gold and the creases of their trousers were razor-sharp. It didn’t matter that he had to spend hour upon hour scrubbing and polishing. It seemed he was coming up in the world and the hardships of home life were far behind him. There was a shower block for the recruits – no more filling up a tin bath in front of the fire. Plus he had three sets of clothing, one on, one in the wash and one pressed and ready in his kitbag: ‘And it was all my own, nothing second-hand and no sending your only suit to the pawnshop.’

Unlike the volunteers and Territorials, many of the regular soldiers were far less enthused by the thought of war. During the 1930s patriotism had played less of a role than poverty in deciding who joined the army. Men like Barber had joined to get off the dole queue, to feed their families and, most importantly, to restore their personal pride. Army life may have been hard but it certainly offered them a future. However, with the army retreating through France, that future seemed less than certain.

One thing was certain. Death was not choosy and war soon stripped away the old divisions between Territorials, regulars, conscripts and reservists. Whereas, just months before, many regulars had laughed at the TA’s ‘weekend warriors’, and TA men had scoffed at the poorly educated and cynical old regulars, now they were all in it together. What mattered was not where a man had come from but what he could offer. The parade-ground creases of the regulars or the inept drilling of the newly conscripted militiamen meant little to men fighting for their lives.

Fred Coster’s first time under fire showed him how survival was a lottery. He had just arrived at his gun position when Stuka dive bombers appeared above and released their deadly cargo: ‘We were firing like mad at them. But we couldn’t keep up with the Stukas. We could see our shells bursting around them but we just couldn’t hit them. We tried to follow them down. It was absolutely frustrating, we’d trained hard then found we hadn’t got a weapon that could engage their planes.’

Unable to drive away the enemy dive bombers, Coster and his fellow gunners soon realized their position was hopeless:This one plane came down at us and we had to take cover. I ran and dived on to the ground. One poor chap took cover in the worst possible place – beneath the gun. A Stuka came down and machine-gunned his legs off. Then a bomb took his arm off. This poor chap was mangled, we rushed him to the aid post but he died on the way. He was a very religious fellow and he was the first one to die. I don’t know if you can read anything into it! To see his death was a big shock. That’s when I realized it was a damn serious business.

These were experiences shared throughout the division. Gordon Barber and the gunners of the Royal Horse Artillery were also getting used to the reality of war. The phoney war may have been an enjoyable period for Barber but the first weeks in action soon removed any remaining glamour. The very first time the regiment deployed their guns one man was killed when a gun rolled back over him. Part of the problem was the guns were too heavy for their mountings since they were 25-pounder guns mounted on the carriages for obsolete 18-pounders. In their first action one of the guns exploded. It was not what Barber had joined the army for: ‘I didn’t go out there for a war – I went into the army for a good time. I thought it had been a good time, we’d been there eight months without firing a shot!’ It was clear the good times were too good to last. Barber spent his first night of battle in an orchard near Abbeville, sheltering from incoming shells:I thought we wouldn’t need a deep trench, the trees will protect us. I spent all night listening to shit falling all around us. Trees and branches were coming down everywhere. I nearly dug meself down into the ground. This bloke Roberts was praying – ‘I want to go home!’ – he’d lost it. He was beneath me crying about getting home to see his wife and all that bollocks. I thought ‘What’s going to happen here?’ In the morning there were shell splinters everywhere.

The following day was no better:We went into action. We were sending it up pretty heavy. I’d been on the gun for so long – I was firing it – that when I came off I was deafened. I was sent down to fetch some ammunition. As we walked down I heard a crash – right in front of our gun. One of our blokes Coppin, who used to be a groom when the regiment still had horses, shouted out, ‘I’ve been hit!’ We rushed to him, picked him up to take him to the medics. I picked him up by the shoulders and my mate got his legs. As we lifted him I noticed one of his arms was just hanging off. I can still remember all the blood running down over my uniform and all the tendons hanging out from his arm. Do you know what he said to me? ‘When they take me arm off, tell them to keep my ring and give it to me.’ I thought ‘Oh my God!’ Then he said, ‘Have you got a fag Nobby?’ So I shoved one in his gob. There was nothing left of his arm, it was just hanging on by a bit of flesh. As they took him away I told the medics about his ring and said, ‘I’ll see you later.’ But I never saw him again, I found out later he’d died – a bit of shrapnel had hit him in the side.

As the division retreated from the Somme, the enemy never seemed far behind. Gunners recalled stopping, dismounting, getting the guns into action, then hitching up again almost as soon as a few rounds had been fired. In the haze of exhaustion, they did their best to keep firing – hoping the guns would hold off the enemy just long enough for everybody to reach safety. The frenetic nature of the retreat was soon revealed to Fred Coster when one of the gunners in his regiment engaged the enemy with his Bofors gun while it was still being towed. This was not something they had been taught on the training grounds of England – it was just pure reflex action by men who were desperate to escape.

Despite the situation, the troops had all begun to learn, battle itself was not the worst thing they experienced. Once battle started they had something to do – riflemen had to keep firing, machine-gunners concentrated on firing, loading and rapidly changing barrels, gunners kept raining down high-explosive on the enemy, even the officers were so engrossed in giving orders there was little chance their minds could dwell on what fate had in store for them.

It was only before battle that their thoughts wandered, filling their minds with the horrors of what might happen. This tension was unavoidable, gripping at their souls. During the retreat, Fred Coster spotted one group of soldiers he would never forget:I went into no man’s land on a motorbike. I had to get one of our guns back – it had been left behind. So I went to look for it. As I was going through the line I saw a group of Northumberland Fusiliers. They were digging in and just standing in the trenches with rifles. I said, ‘You know what you’re up against, don’t you?’ They nodded – tanks would soon be advancing in their direction. As I went back past these poor guys in the trench, I said, ‘Good luck!’ But I knew they wouldn’t have any luck. They didn’t survive.

The sacrifice of the Fusiliers, who awaited the inevitable assault without weapons that could harm the advancing tanks, reflected so much of the quiet heroism demonstrated that summer. What thoughts must have gone through their minds as they awaited the attack? All hopes for the future were submerged beneath the knowledge of what awaited them. And yet, like so many of their comrades had done during the retreat to Dunkirk, they stood firm, ready to do their duty. The sense of hopelessness was not lost on Fred Coster as he rode onwards, towards the hoped-for sanctuary and salvation supposedly awaiting in St Valery.

While the division’s infantrymen and gunners continued in their desperate attempts to hold back the enemy – each playing out his own personal drama – elsewhere important decisions were being made. These were decisions that would seal the fate of so many under Major-General Fortune’s command. Realizing they needed to fall back to Le Havre ready for evacuation, Fortune made an important decision. Unless their route to the port could be secured there would be no chance of evacuation. If the Germans arrived at Le Havre first all hope of escape would be lost and if the division had to fight all the way to the town he knew they would be decimated. On 9 June, with the nearby city of Rouen captured by the enemy, General Fortune despatched a collection of units to secure the line of retreat to Le Havre. This force was based around the fresh A Brigade that had been attached to his command just days before. Ark Force, as it was to be known, would hold the line between Fécamp and Bolbec, receiving its name by virtue of having first been formed in the town of Arques le Bataille. It was an appropriate choice of name – just like Noah’s Ark, this was to rescue them from the flood of enemy forces rushing towards the Channel, and ensure they could all sail to safety. Consisting of the 4th Black Watch, 7th and 8th Argylls, 4th Buffs, 4th Border Regiment, 7th Sherwood Foresters and 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers, the unit established its headquarters in Le Havre’s Rue Félix Faure, under the command of Brigadier Stanley Clarke DSO.